I helped a friend purchase some Jaybird Bluebuds X Bluetooth earphones recently on Amazon and had it shipped to Malaysia. Unfortunately they stopped working not too long after. I don’t mind stuff breaking down, since there always is the possibility of a manufacturing defect. The issue in this case is that companies usually don’t support customers who are overseas. If I had to ship the item back to the USA and pay for shipping back to Malaysia, that’s usually too expensive for me. In the end, I figured I’d best try my luck and contacted the live support at Jaybird.

Long story short, they didn’t quibble at all, and after verifying that I actually have the item to avoid fraud cases, are willing to ship a replacement unit to me in Malaysia free of charge, and I don’t even need to waste money shipping the broken unit back to them.

That’s just amazing support. If you’re living in the USA, it might not sound like a big deal, but if you’re living in Malaysia, you’ll know that most distributors/manufacturers almost never honour their warranties and come up with all sorts of silly reasons to wiggle out of replacing a faulty product.

If and when my current earphones do kick the bucket, I’m getting a pair from Jaybird. They deserve it.

Unless I’m mistaken, from the very beginning this blog has been hosted with Exabytes Malaysia. I used a no-frills shared hosting plan along with several other sites of mine. There is a saying that you get what you pay for, so I really shouldn’t have been too surprised that the site would go down every now and then. Considering that there are barely any readers on this blog, it really wasn’t much of an issue.

Recently after I started RubyCoded web development with my partner Jenxi, we realised that we need a more reliable host and scouted around. After going through a many online reviews and trying a few other hosts, including Media Temple and Hawk Host, we finally decided on WebFaction, which was an excellent recommendation by David Wang.

While the WebFaction set up is slightly different form the traditional host that offers a Cpanel interface, everything has been running smoothly so far. In fact, the speeds are awesome, and I haven’t encountered any uptime issues whatsoever. The price is really competitive too.

If WebFaction manages to maintain this level of service and pricing, I’ll be sticking with them for quite a while.